Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who had been diagnosed with Ebola in Dallas, Texas, died on Wednesday. He was 42.

Duncan was the first person to have been diagnosed with the virus in the United States. He had been receiving the experimental drug Brincidofovir since Saturday. Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where he was being treated, said Tuesday afternoon that Duncan was on a ventilator and had been receiving dialysis.

“It is with profound sadness and heartfelt disappointment that we must inform you of the death of Thomas Eric Duncan this morning at 7:51 am,” a hospital spokesperson said. “Mr. Duncan succumbed to an insidious disease, Ebola. He fought courageously in this battle. Our professionals, the doctors and nurses in the unit, as well as the entire Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas community, are also grieving his passing. We have offered the family our support and condolences at this difficult time.”

It’s not clear exactly when or where Duncan contracted the disease, but in mid-September he had assisted a woman in Liberia who later died of Ebola. Duncan and others had helped bring Marthalene Williams, 19, to the hospital.

Duncan arrived in Dallas on Sept. 20 to visit his partner, Louise Troh. On Sept. 25, after he complained of a fever and abdominal pain, Troh drove him to the Texas hospital, where health care workers sent him home with antibiotics. It was only after his condition worsened days later that he was taken back to the hospital in an ambulance and placed in isolation.

The Texas hospital has been sharply criticized for failing to recognize Duncan’s symptoms, even though he told them he had come from Liberia, where the virus has run rampant. Last Thursday, the hospital said that a flaw in their computer system prevented the information from reaching doctors. They walked back that statement on Friday but provided no alternative explanation.

Meanwhile, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has been monitoring 38 people who may have come into contact with Duncan, including hospital employees and family members. So far, none of them have showed any of the typical Ebola symptoms.

Duncan’s family visited him on Monday and was disturbed by his condition.

“What we saw was very painful. It didn’t look good,” said Josephus Weeks, his nephew.

“The past week has been an enormous test of our health system, but for one family it has been far more personal,” said David Lakey, the commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services. “Today they lost a dear member of their family. They have our sincere condolences, and we are keeping them in our thoughts. The doctors, nurses and staff at Presbyterian provided excellent and compassionate care, but Ebola is a disease that attacks the body in many ways. We’ll continue every effort to contain the spread of the virus and protect people from this threat.”

The family of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old man who died in July after police put him in a chokehold, is planning to sue New York City over his death, the New York Times reported.

The lawsuit also targets the New York Police department as well as several individual officers who were present when he died. According to the Staten Island Advance, family members are seeking $75 million in damages for wrongful death, among other claims.

On July 17th, Garner was arrested for illegally selling cigarettes. During his arrest, an officer named Daniel Pantaleo put him in a chokehold and pushed his head into the ground. He died minutes later of a heart attack.

A leaked video of the incident sparked massive criticisms of police tactics and cries for justice.

Left, Fox News host Andrea Tantaros says African Ebola victims may seek “witch doctors.” Right, Nowa Paye, 9, is taken to an ambulance after showing signs of the Ebola infection in the village of Freeman Reserve, about 30 miles north of Monrovia, Liberia, Tuesday Sept. 30, 2014. Three members of District 13 ambulance service traveled to the village to pick up six suspected Ebola sufferers that had been quarantined by villagers. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay)

OMG EBOLA IS HERE! EVERYBODY PANIC. No. Don’t. I’m just kidding. Although many people already have started, so this might be a little too late.

The first case of the Ebola virus diagnosed on American soil is here with Thomas Eric Duncan in Dallas. The Liberian man came into the United States last week and unknowingly brought the deadly illness with him, shattering everyone’s safety bubble in one instant (even though there shouldn’t be one but more on that later). He is one of thousands who the current epidemic has touched, but his diagnosis here seems to have created something that looks like ramping hysteria as people freak out that maybe they were next.

Last month, two Americans who got infected while treating patients were airlifted out of Liberia and taken to Emory Hospital in Atlanta. The panic actually started then as people wondered why the virus was being brought closer to home. Apparently, while it was in certain regions of West Africa, it was ok because that was far away. People wondered why the CDC wouldn’t want to “keep that in Africa.” Oh ok. Let’s not use modern medicine and the best scientific minds to see how it can be handled better everywhere.

Reading details of the Secret Service’s failure to protect the president, I was jolted by a sudden premonition. Our country is once again risking “the fire next time.” James Baldwin’s dreadful prophesy – a phrase he borrowed from an old Negro spiritual – was published in 1963 when the civil rights movement was approaching its climactic triumph. Yet the novelist’s resonant warning came true a few years later. Cities across America were in flames. This is not a prediction of what is coming, but my fear. We should talk candidly about this risk before it is too late.

Let me be explicit about what I imagine might occur. If something bad should happen to hurt President Obama or his family, the “fire” could be ignited again by people’s rage and sorrow. Some will object that my warning is inflammatory, but I see silence as a greater danger.

The basic fact is this: there are demented Americans who do want to harm the president and have repeatedly threatened his life. Nobody knows how many or how dangerous they might be. Threats are a standard circumstance for the presidency, but the alarming difference is that threats against Barack Obama have been three times higher than for his predecessors, according to the Washington Post, which first revealed the Secret Service lapses. The explanation is obvious. This president is black, so is his family.

“Michelle Obama has spoken publicly about fearing for her family’s safety since her husband became the nation’s first black president,” Post reporter Carol Leonnig wrote. “Her concerns are well-founded. President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.”

After the Post reported this elevated risk assessment, the New York Times was told by a Secret Service spokesman that the threats against Obama have subsequently subsided to more typical levels. Given recent episodes in which the agency withheld embarrassing facts, even from the president, it is hard to judge which estimate to trust.

My larger point is this: The country is again becoming a racial tinderbox. We have witnessed many warning signs in places like Ferguson, Missouri where another white cop shot an unarmed black teenager. Politicians mostly look the other way, perhaps fearful of provoking stronger emotions. But some politicians have actively encouraged racist resentments. The political system is implicated in stoking social discontents, white and black, because it has been unwilling (or unable) to do anything about the economic distress. It feels as though the society is stymied too, people waiting sullenly for some triggering event that might express their pain and anger.

Specifically, I accuse the Republican Party of adroitly exploiting racial tensions in the age of Obama in order to mobilize its electoral base and gain political advantage. Black Americans know what I mean. They have endured such political tactics for many generations. Indeed, as black leaders told Peter Baker of the New York Times, many African-American citizens are suspicious of the Secret Service failures that exposed the black president to danger.

When Barack Obama was elected six years ago, I wrote a short editorial for The Nation, “This Proud Moment,” that celebrated his historic achievement and the country’s. “Racism will not disappear entirely,” it said, “but the Republican “Southern Strategy’ that marketed racism has been smashed.” That seemed true at the time, but now sounds foolishly premature.

The Republican Party has not given up on racism. It has developed new ways to play the “race card” without ever mentioning race. With Obama in the White House, the GOP does not need to run TV ads featuring “black hands” taking jobs from “white hands” or the one that shows Willie Horton, the black rapist. Obama’s own face on television is sufficient. It reminds hard-core supporters why they hate the man.

Instead of obvious race-baiting, the GOP plan was to demonize Barack Obama right from the start. He was portrayed as an alien being, a strange character and not truly an American. Maybe he was African like his absent Kenyan father. Where is the birth certificate? And he’s a socialist like those foreigners in Europe. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley revealed that Obama’s health care reform includes “death panels” that will decide when old people must die. The half-baked Donald Trump was invited to Republican forums to mock the black guy.

When the “birther” movement ran out of steam, the ideological accusations hardened in its place. Fox News and other TV talkers upped the ante. Obama wasn’t just a political issue. The black guy was a threat to America’s survival as a nation of free people. The “takers” were the lazy Americans (read: blacks on welfare) who lived off virtuous Republicans who are the “makers.”

Barack Obama was uniquely prepared to liberate politics from its racial taboos and he had the courage to try. He had grown up biracial and at home in both cultures. He understood that he could not prevail if he became the “black candidate” since that would inflame some voters and make the election about race. Obama adroitly avoided that pit—but perhaps did not anticipate that white Republicans would find ways to demonize him anyway. He kept searching sincerely for compromise. They kept pinning inflammatory labels on him.

The clearest evidence that agitating racial malice was the Republican subtext for brutally disparaging Obama’s intelligence, character and loyalty was reflected in the behavior of their Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. On the eve of Obama’s first inauguration, McConnell informed fellow Republican senators that there would be no working relationship with the Democratic president — none. The GOP would oppose everything and block every measure the White House proposed.

“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” said Senator George Voinivich of Ohio. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.” Vice President Joe Biden. Who presided in the Senate, was taken aback by McConnell’s hard line. It crippled the Obama presidency but also did great damage to the country. Biden heard from seven Republican senators who told him the same thing. They said, “Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything. We can’t let you succeed.”

This take-no-prisoners strategy does not by itself prove that McConnell was purposely agitating racial resentments but the fact that his leadership style was so stubborn and single-minded suggests that Republicans had committed to a strategy that would exploit the racial memory of white southerners and other conservatives. McConnell was not himself racist when I knew him slightly in the early 1970s, when he was then a young staffer on Capitol Hill and an upfront liberal Republican, especially on civil rights. I expect his views on race are not changed.

But as a white southerner, he cannot claim to be ignorant of what he was doing. With his hard-nosed strategy, McConnell was shamefully agitating old racial stereotypes, hoping to make the black guy a one-term president. He failed at that but he still poisoned the political atmosphere for the country. I am not accusing the Republican party and its leaders of plotting to harm the president physically. I am accusing them of deliberately inflaming racist attitudes that might inspire malicious acts by others. They deserve shame, however the elections turn out.

Even more shameful in my book, the Supreme Court and its right-wing majority have collaborated in this partisan effort, aiding and abetting the Republican party’s racial politics. The Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito are, measure by measure, destroying rights that citizens won in years of hard struggle. In the process, they are also destroying the court’s honorable reputation.

The party of Lincoln moved south 40 years ago and embraced the die-hard remnants of white supremacy. The country will not restore two-party representative democracy until the southern segregationists are once again overcome.

William Greider is national affairs correspondent for The Nation, and has been a political journalist for more than thirty-five years. A former Rolling Stone and Washington Post editor, he is the author of The Soul of Capitalism (Simon & Schuster).

Nurses, the frontline care providers in U.S. hospitals, say they are untrained and unprepared to handle patients arriving in their hospital emergency departments infected with Ebola.
Many say they have gone to hospital managers, seeking training on how to best care for patients and protect themselves and their families from contracting the deadly disease, which has so far killed at least 3,338 people in the deadliest outbreak on record.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has repeatedly said that U.S. hospitals are prepared to handle such patients. Many infectious disease experts agree with that assessment.

Dr. Edward Goodman, an infectious disease doctor at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas that is now caring for the first Ebola patient to be diagnosed in this country, believed his hospital was ready.

The hospital had completed Ebola training just before Thomas Eric Duncan arrived in their emergency department on Sept. 26. But despite being told that Duncan had recently traveled from Liberia, hospital staff failed to recognize the Ebola risk and sent him home, where he spent another two days becoming sicker and more infectious.

“The Texas case is a perfect example,” said Micker Samios, a triage nurse in the emergency department at Medstar Washington Hospital Center, the largest hospital in the nation’s capital.

“In addition to not being prepared, there was a flaw in diagnostics as well as communication,” Samios said

Nurses argue that inadequate preparation could increase the chances of spreading Ebola if hospital staff fail to recognize a patient coming through their doors, or if personnel are not informed about how to properly protect themselves.

At Medstar, the issue of Ebola training came up at the bargaining table during contract negotiations.

“A lot of staff feel they aren’t adequately trained,” said Samios, whose job is to greet patients in the emergency department and do an initial assessment of their condition.

The first black man assigned to the U.S. Secret Service White House detail is speaking out about the recent security lapses surrounding President Obama and the First Family. In a letter to Blackmansstreet.Today and The NorthStar News & Analysis, Abraham Bolden, Sr., writes:

“I am concerned. I am sorry to see that not much has changed since I was on the detail in 1961. At that time, and for the past 50 years, agents have consistently denied that dereliction of duty and irresponsible conduct was endemic within the Secret Service. I paid a very high price for trying to reveal what I perceived to be practices that compromised the safety of this nation’s chief executive by some of the agents surrounding the president.”

Bolden was a Secret Service agent based in Chicago when President John F. Kennedy met him on a visit to the city and urged he apply for the White House detail. In 1961 Bolden became the first African American to join the group.

But Bolden quickly experienced racism and unprofessional behavior by his fellow agents. He explains in his bookThe Echo from Dealey Plazathat the training was inadequate and drinking on the job by agents was common. Agents said they would never take a bullet for Kennedy because of his positions on civil rights. One agent told him in front of colleagues, “You will always be a nigger. So act like one.”

Bolden (pictured above) left the presidential detail before the 1963 assassination of Kennedy, moved back to Chicago and continued to work for the Secret Service. He told colleagues before and after Kennedy’s murder about the sloppy behavior and good old boy culture that permeated the presidential detail. SeeAbraham Bolden

Bolden’s comments in a letter to BlackMansstreet.Today and The NorthStar News & Analysis follow the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson. Two weeks ago, a man scaled the White House fence and got into the living quarters of the First Family. Last month in Atlanta a private security guard with a criminal history wore a gun as he rode an elevator with the president. In 2011, a sniper shot and hit the White House several times but it took the Secret Service four days to determine that shots had been fired.

Some would say that Bolden’s warning has no credibility. He left the Secret Service under a cloud after colleagues claimed he sold a government document to men he was investigating. He was brought to trial and convicted of the charge in 1964 and served three years.

But Bolden has stood by his innocence from day one, and he has worked for more than 40 years to have his conviction expunged. Bolden writes the Secret Service sought to ruin his reputation because it wanted to hide its complicity in the Kennedy assassination. He states that the judge in his trial told the jury before they began deliberations that Bolden was guilty. Later, a key prosecution witness admitted under oath he had committed perjury in his testimony against Bolden.
And Bolden has never backed down from his statements on the behavior of the presidential detail that was supposed to guard Kennedy.

Some 100 people are now being screened for potential exposure to Ebola in Texas, federal health officials said Thursday, as they seek to contain the first case of the disease diagnosed in the U.S. Tom Frieden, director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said so far they have identified a handful of individuals who may have come into contact with the patient, including members of his household

He said that systems are in place to contain the spread of Ebola in the U.S., but said that there will always be a risk of someone contracting the disease until the outbreak in Africa is controlled

“What we can do is minimize that risk, as is being done now in Dallas, by working to ensure that there are no more individuals exposed,” he said during a conference call with reporters

President Barack Obama on Thursday called Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to discuss the government’s response to the Ebola case and ensure the city what it needs to contain the virus, the White House said Thursday. “The president called to make sure the mayor was getting the resources he needed from the federal government, including the Centers for Disease Control, to treat the patient safely and control this case so that it does not spread widely,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

At the schools attended by the five children who came into contact with Mr. Duncan, custodians were doing extra cleaning, said Mike Miles, superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District. Still, attendance at

Students protest outside of Ralston Valley High School, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014, in Arvada, Colo. The students are protesting a proposal by the Jefferson County School Board to emphasize patriotism and downplay civil unrest in the teaching of U.S. history. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Large-scale student protests and “teacher sick-out” school closures have recently thrust the school board of Jefferson County, Colorado, into the spotlight.

I am a parent of three students in the district, and I have watched with growing alarm the conduct of the school board. I have asked theGrio.com to anonymously publish this piece due to the fact that several people who are publicly speaking out against the conservative board majority are being subjected to harassment and threats against their families.

The community reaction is the result of several controversial actions taken by the three conservative members of the Jefferson County School Board: Ken Witt, John Newkirk, and Julie Williams (commonly referred to together as WNW).

Michael Dunn wipes a tear as he testifies during his retrial at the Duval County Courthouse, Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2014, in Jacksonville, Fla. Dunn is being retried on murder charges for the shooting death of 17-year old Jordan Davis in a dispute over loud music at a Jacksonville gas station in November of 2012. Dunn was found guilty of three counts of attempted murder and one count of shooting or throwing a deadly missile during his previous trial, but the jury was deadlocked on the murder charge. (AP Photo/The Florida Times-Union, Bruce Lipsky, Pool)

Today, the Power Check coalition, a new national non-partisan network of leaders and organizations focused on tapping the power of social media to engage infrequent voters, will launch a final push that urges voters to “check their power” before November 6th. It includes a follow up event with Sommore on October 25th in Harrisburg Pennsylvania.

This is their fourth Power Check Day and may be the most important one. Not only is October 6th the last day for individuals to register to vote in more than a dozen states, but it gives voters who are registered enough time to seek remedy if they find out that sweeping changes to voter laws have resulted in them not being able to vote. More importantly, this will be their first time working with celebrities like comedian Sommore to reach a broader audience.

Power Check is a newly formed national social media platform that was specifically created to remind voters to get active this election cycle by harnessing the potential of the demographic revolution and blending traditional civil rights organizing tactics. It is an offshoot of the Get Active 123 campaign – an outreach program that asks voters to do three things: 1) Register to vote, 2) Vote early, and 3) Help someone vote on Election Day (#GA123).

“Our vote is our voice and our power. Everyone knows that in order to expect changes in our communities we need high voter turnout. The stakes are high so we intend to get the entire community to join us,” said comedian Sommore. “We selected the last day of voter registration for the social media push to highlight the significance of this year’s election where young voters are most at-risk of being this year’s drop off voters.

“This social media campaign has been very successful and will be key to driving turnout now and beyond.” said Melanie Campbell, Executive Director of the National Coalition of Civic Participation. “It is especially needed following the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelby decision on voting. Many states have passed voter laws that limit early voting and placed new restrictions around voter identification. In some states thousands of names have been purged from the records.

“Let’s remember that midterm elections are important because we elect individuals who will fight for our interests in the communities and states where we live,” Campbell adds.

The program reminds voters to check their voting status with their Secretary of State and urges voters to call the Election Protection hotline at 866-Our-Vote if they feel that their voting rights are being unjustifiably challenged. This effort comes on the heels of recent Supreme Court decisions that affected the Voting Rights Act, which struck down the pre-clearance portion of the law.

“We will not allow this historical moment pass without doing everything in our power to help increase voter turnout in our communities” said Sommore. “There is a saying where I come from, ‘If you knew better you would do better’ and I’m pushing for us to do better.”